The Wonderful Life of Fred Rogers (Review)

BookCaps is a publishing company which offers concise summaries for quickly covering specific topics. According to their website, "We all need refreshers every now and then. Whether you are a student trying to cram for that big final, or someone just trying to understand a book more, BookCaps can help."

You know this kind of book. Not quite Cliff's Notes, but pretty much the same concept.

Mister Rogers: A Biography of the Wonderful Life of Fred Rogers is available on Amazon for five or six bucks and, honestly, it's hardly worth even that much. Anyone unfamiliar with the BookCaps concept might purchase this book expecting a detailed and insightful biography of Fred Rogers. What this book actually provides is a very quick overview of his life -- nothing that couldn't be found with a quick visit to Wikipedia.

Coming in at just over 100 pages, the type is large and the margins are very generous. In reality, this book should have been printed on about half as many pages.

In addition, several details in this book are somewhat questionable including a very vague and slightly misleading discription of the Christmastime with Mister Rogers special and some characters referred to by inaccurate names (e.g. "Daniel the Tiger" and "Grandpedre Tiger"). Furthermore, there are some instances of just plain old-fashioned typographical errors such as "Lady Aberline" and "Hilda Pingleborder." Fred's birthday is even incorrect -- detailed as March 28th instead of March 20th.

While the effort in remembering Fred through this book is a positive, if you're looking for a true biography of Fred Rogers, I would point you towards the America's Favorite Neighbor documentary and encourage you to steer clear of this poorly written Neighborhood crash-course.